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Chapter Three
CEREBRAL NUBILITY,
SPIRITUAL ASSIDUITY
and the WORSHIP OF GOD
News 419,
The Australian May 21, 2009
NUBILE RATHER THAN NUBILOUS ?
Well, all I can say is that it is extreme.
In what way ?
He is making it sound as if your brain could regenerate, rejuvenate, at least in the sense of reorganising and arousing and expressing new functions to the day you die.
But he is only an author, some Norman Doidge, isn't he ? What would he know about it ?
He happens to be a doctor as well, of medicine, apparently a best-selling Canadian author.
That doesn't prove a lot.
Still, if he states, being a doctor, physical cases - one would think, in a book at least, he would value his professional reputation.
What cases ? I don't remember anything about that ?
It was in The Australian, May 21, 2009.
I know that.
Didn't you read it ?
I skimmed through it, sensational stuff.
His idea is neuroplasticity: the brain some dynamic organ that can respond sensitively to the challenge of novelty, new questions, and like a muscle, grow in strength compared with its dull future if a listless soul de-energises it in a torpor or the like. It pays systematic dividends for challenge, right to the end. This is his idea. He even has a caption to his photograph: “Brain exercise is crucial to its nubility” – presumably intending symbolically to signify this neuroplasticity, the brain enduring various pressures, and yet coming to a readiness to be creative yet, when grown and in fact grown old, and this not only in products, but in capacity. The contrast between ageing and coming of age is doubtless a shock tactic to emphasise the vitality he has in mind, even to the last, in brain activation and learning, perhaps even with certain structural results, and certainly with functional and organisational ones.
No doubt; but what of this 'case' you mention ?
It concerned a woman born with what the article calls "half a brain" and he is cited as saying that this had "rewired itself, to work as a whole."
Yes, I do recall something about improving IQ and moving more gracefully, through putting the brain expectantly through its paces.
I for my part recall earlier talk by a special student of the area to the effect that the concept of just wearing out, losing brain cells with age, was over-stated. He was emphatic: the brain CAN manufacture new brain cells, and requiring of it fuller function is the call: USE the thing as you age, don't capitulate to apathy.
You once mentioned something about brain injury I believe ?
Yes, I read of cases of injury at war, brain injury, leading to re-organisation pretty much the way this doctor describes. In other words, this part of the brain being damaged, certain functions were moved to what was not their normal place, so that the work could continue. It was amazing: not only did the brain work by means of billions of inter-related cells, each one a triumph of DNA memory emplacement and functional capacity, a sort of combination of a bookshop and a multi-task engineering tool, with some mathematical brilliance imparted as well; but it could, to a certain extent and in certain circumstances go much further and actually, actively re-organise even sites for action, alternative ones, because of total systematic need.
In other words, not only does it have a resource to store for the recall of millions of bits of information, but a function to organise them with such an exquisite facility and overall instillation by some means of total relationship to total function on the part of elements or areas, that it can even to some extent re-arrange things. I mean, an electrician for your house in one thing; but someone to reorganise the wiring to enable your special needs to be met by alternative ways ...
Yes, I see your point, someone so inspired as to be able to innovate in order to meet fixed and knowable purpose ... and then, passing it all on, do so without personal involvement through having installed a program for the purpose of meeting just such contingencies, this is an avalanche of wonder.
Indeed: for it is so foolish to imagine that passing on arrangements that condition responses on stimuli, and have the equivalent of descriptive orders of how to meet impacts internal or external is something less than personal. It is more than simple thought: it is thought codified, compressed, stylised and subjected to transmission in standardised, reactive format. It is rather like Morse code: it is not less than language in being codified; it is in some ways more, for it requires not only the conditions for expression and reception, but an added feature, their subjection to a format for special use.
NOT A CEREBRAL COUNCIL OF WAR,
A FEISTY PRINCIPLE
OR A GHOSTLY FIGURE
But let's not go too far. The brain itself does not know: it does not have a council of way, and sitting down at the drawing board, make new arrangements in terms of priorities ...
True. It is a medium for thought in its
construction, both in containing premises for action, and enabling our use of it
for our own. Thus, it is in one way, more than direct thought. It is so
PROGRAMMED, that given certain CONTINGENCIES, it can carry out works which IMPLY
the presence of such KNOWLEDGE in the programmer. Programming to have the thing
is brilliance beyond imagination, and though limited to cases, in these it is
more and not less than the equivalent of a council for plans. It is already instilled with possibilities and available outcomes ...
True, the thought has provided for their limitations, but has equally enabled
their automatic response within these. It is like a car: it does not drive for
you, but it does enable a host of things to happen automatically, and some more
as you so act as to stir them to act automatically in kind, at your will.
Conceptualisable provisions are in the realm of concept and counsel, not of
barren occurrence.
Yes indeed. An aircraft on automatic pilot could have such things, and one reads that there are even automatic landing methods for crippled aircraft in some major circumstances, the case arising to public view because one air-company declined to instal these because they cost too much. They cost because such conceptualised programmatics take standardising thought to cover expressible cases, which then have to be coded into reliable performance when the case arises. Programs require thought, thought envisagement, envisagement purpose, purpose person, and person a certain responsibility.
That is why manufacturers of such things provide handbooks. We do not imagine that their airplanes plan themselves. In this age of the automatic when we CONTINUALLY evidence what it takes to provide for contingencies by program, it would be more than a little ludicrous to imagine that codified thought is less than thought, and standardised provision for contingencies is less than uncontrolled and undirected conception.
WE can make things vastly simpler and amazingly impressive; but it is on a vastly greater scale BOTH of intricacy, multi-functionality and miniaturisation mixed, that our own brains can outdo it all categorically. Denton in his Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, in which he debunks the entire anomalous, conceptual catastrophe of imagining chance happenings producing giant products which have the equivalent in function of what is far beyond anything man can make, and this forwarded in ways so adroit, sophisticated and sustained overall that they dwarf man's powers. There is a certain qualitative aspect that contrasts with non-direction, to the uttermost.
Yes, I recall it. Even single cells are marvels of engineering construction and felicitous organisation in type and method. What seeks to eliminate the premises of order empirically is met by what accentuates them in false theory: it is a direct clash of foolish concept and wholly other reality.
The concept of continuity he disdained, saying it exists in this respect only in the mind of man, not in 'nature'. He showed in element after element, and facets and feature a whole array of orderly and exquisite organisation, with hierarchical aspects and specialised results that show nothing of promiscuous happening but rather a continuity of call into existence on grounds and with specialised individuality for the various types.
Well what else. There are entire arenas of discourse relevant to total function and lack of evidential residues of failed efforts. On the other hand, in verification and activation, there is nothing to support what lacks what it takes doing what is done.
As to Denton, after that work, he went for mysticism as the source,
intelligent mysticism,
didn't he*1 ?
That is beside the point. Turning to terminology without precision when you establish a practical need is not the way. You have to be consistent and pursue causality to its uttermost, or else imagine loosely. For poetry, yes; for science no.
Wasn't Hoyle, Professor of astronomy at Cambridge, of the same mind, and if possible, more emphatic in his work on intelligence in the universe, insisting that it CANNOT be non-intelligence which has as product the specificities of intelligence of the uttermost, pervasive kind.
Yes, but he for his part, short-circuited thought then, by making up some idea of other intelligences coming to earth ...
That merely ignores the reality. For this, there is zero evidence and for the concept there is utter irrelevance: it does not matter WHAT you imagine, what product, what intelligent, formed, formatted beings you want to talk about because your imagination gets excited and your scientific prowess takes leave of absence with a novel or something of that sort. The end is the same: where is the beginning! It is the same with teleological principles: WHAT principles ? WHERE are they seen in action ? Laws don't make themselves. Creative calls to things to upgrade are either evidenced or not. Not! In fact what is evidenced is that what has been called into being is not now being so, information does not 'arise' and command is not newly coded. You do not need imaginary beings, intelligent aliens or impartative principles. Principles describe what is happening, or the conditions on which you are willing to make it happen; but the things still have to happen and all the principles in the world do not do this. They simply describe an aspect of purpose or performance.
Performance then needs something more: directed action, and this requires grounds for it, adequate for the type of action.
Exactly. You need what HAS the intelligence to PRODUCE what is commanded to perform in the first place, and in the process you may exhibit principles as to the mode of your action. A principle does not think: it is the result of thought, either in its manufacture into the nature of something, or in its perception.
Yes of course, I quite agree with you. Formulation of information and codification of formulation require conceptualising capacity which is a qualititave feature of mind, and institutive resolve, which is a focus for personality.
We progress. To have anything so equipped as if it were reached by some sort of forgetfulness on the part of matter, forgetting itself and acting as if a person with thought and resolve, in an intelligent mode with intelligent products with mutually intelligently organised functions which matched each other in correlative capacities with supervisory systems, is the attribution of effects for unrelated causes, and the smuggling in of personal byproducts for impersonal items, turned into practising agents of thought. The interlocking of systems, such as that for fighting disease and circulated blood, entrained and incorporated, all with commands organised into miniaturised DNA and its concomitants, requires not non-systematic but systematic organisational skill; for it is a cosmos of creative correlation propelled by cause into simultaneous action in terms of overall conspectus, not a happening of non-conceptual irrelevance happening by adventure to move into a realm for which it has neither prowess nor equipment.
In short, thought has its own ways in overall quality of aspiration, concentration and creation, and non-thought has its ways of continuing in whatever type of situation its callow non-ideation has placed it. Each has its cosmos. What performs as commands is one thing; what commands performance is another. What exists in a setting in one thing; what constructs the system for existence and calls the shots for what can be done, is another. What makes laws is one thing; what keeps them is another. To ignore empirical reality and to try to imagine what is not, to be what is, what does not evince powers to have them, and to confuse the powers of the one with those of the other, each empirically expressible, is not science. It is scientific suicide, and the sooner this is recognised the better.
It is truly wonderful, when you look at the type of commands involved. I read of both coding and non-coding DNA, the latter evidently including schema and coverages to ensure that the modes of procedure are correct and apt, almost a supervisory role. In fact, the whole universe of action (as distinct from a universe of discourse) in this multi-cosmos complexity, being programmed with command and consequence, is just one of the definable aspects of intelligence. It is capable of discerning, creating, dealing, providing, interfering on conceptual grounds, instituting in correlative systems and the like. That is what is its function in no small measure. Through it flows genesis of operation, just as it conveys this in product and mode, through inventing codes to convey conceptualisation in command, and before that, prior conceptualisation to construct reality according to plan and program.
That is the creation side, given matter. That, in turn, so constructed, becomes susceptible to OUR creation of concepts to intuit and convey the modes to OUR minds. The creation of the universe as an outward thing becomes susceptible to our creation of pictures of its ways as an inward thing, and tests of the same. The organising combination of imagination and conception is common to both: matter has it instructed into format, and we have it constricted into code; and then we construct it into understanding.
You were going to come back to our present point no doubt.
No, I leave that to you.
I INSIST you cover it.
It does not matter where and in what you want to invest intelligence, its marks are clear-cut and its ways are known. It is not just that we practise them; we exhibit the nature of what we practice, its powers, portents and modes. When it comes to codes, commands, functional conceptualisation and products, multi-systematic integrality, irreducible complexity, profundity, multiplicity in architecturally composed totality with results that are multiple in function and dirigible in purpose BY ONE OF OURSELVES, we illustrate a principle. THIS is the correlation; we have the power to deploy it. It HAS to be there.
What then of the space men, aliens and spectres drawing things upward, principles operative with a drawing power of some kind, evidently integrated with conceptual knowledge and information and powers of thoughts, some principles! Are they not simply misused terminology for a person; and in this case, for one whose work does NOT continue. It is done.
Certainly. If you put in it space men, in beckoning ghosts, in spectral figures, in teleological drawing powers, as you might find in Hoyle for one case or in some manner*1 Denton, you do not eliminate the basic and original need. For this result, you need intelligence which has to be based in a cause sufficient for its existence, the same way that matter does. It is a multiple call for causation. When, instead of facing this, you vent your desires in such imaginary ideas of space men or principles acting, you merely give vent to dreams without ground or evidence of attestation. It is the issuance of the intelligence that is the point, whatever formulations without evidence you may wish to make. These are ideas of intermediaries, lacking answer to the causation, and attestation of what grants their existence as well. It is a double irrelevance. Such things do not show themselves; they are contrary to what is shown, a fait accompli, and besides this, you need what makes to exist the powers, in this case of intelligence. In such creations of thought, the essential point is merely sidestepped.
What point ?
Why the originating encompassment BY intelligence of the products. For that of course you need that originating intelligence as well. Calling for delimited products, themselves organised in a manner to give them form and format, function and capacity, measurable in function, you need THEIR source. It is quite useless to imagine the cause and then ignore its requirements. It is not a matter of imagination at all. It is one of sober evaluation of necessary minimal fucntion. Is that the point you are looking for ?
Of course it is!
You want the source and origin of what happened in steps. Death of what was not up to it (called the 'unfit') is not the same as envisionment and originative skill to make new stuff to get better. Bits by degrees, to be coherent, have to be constructed in the realm of correlation and institution, power in a cosmos relative to quality and capacity. Letting a sub-moronic 'matter' wait around for conceptual, correlative, integrative, mathematical, engineering marvels of intellectual might, to arrive by delay is not a causative possibility. You are asking what lacks what is needed to provide it. It appears a form of anti-scientific madness, some brilliant minds decoyed as if intoxicated with ideas that are anti-operational.
You can say that again.
I have better things to do. The point is this: if you look for an idea of what is causing something, you do NOT, repeat Not ...
I thought you were so very busy ...
Not too busy to answer that: NOT, I say a third time, look where the criteria to produce, the evidence of production and the functional facilities to move in that realm are ZERO by ALL tests. You look instead for what has the MOST of this sort of thing, the BEST related to it, and the most ATTESTED in other ways. Then you consider jars and non-sequiturs mentally and experimentally, to find if you erred.
And here ? doubtless you imply that to look for matter to do that is the opposite, and to look for the spirit which in man creates, using the brain, but DIRECTING IT (sometimes to make fraud, such is the mind's servility and the spirit's mastery), is in the proper realm.
Yes ... but not in some mystic sense in which you just TALK about what never attests itself, but rather about what does these things evidentially in KIND, illustrating the call for what was in MIND when it was done.
Could you expatiate on that ?
In other words, space men or teleologically disposed spectres, to use the words of one great scientist who saw such a being DRAWING creation UP and ON, or mere descriptive principles to explain the staggering perfections of mode and method and the layers of magnificence that lie around on the earth, creations, these bypass the point. THEY need the same facility of creative functionality to MAKE THEM, or to make them operative by instituting by adequate power, the cosmos where they describe what is made to HAPPEN. ANYTHING delimited and definable in compelled, organised, instituted ways, dependent not on itself, MUST have just such a source of intelligence as anything else. You cannot find rest for reason until you move on to what does NOT have this kind of crafted destiny, but simply does the crafting.
You mean that in the end, you require the operative being with power, without being constrained, controlled in any way itself, so that it is in itself the ultimate, requiring no cause, showing no tooth-marks of causality on itself, being causatively productive.
Just so.
I see: it includes the very nature of our sort of causation, but so far from being part it, when you have to wait, being limited, and the like, it instituted it. Is that right ?
True. He is always there and always adequate, He invents derivative intelligences, and creates these; expressions of intelligence and codifies these or simply commands them, according as they are life forms or not; and He invents serial causation, where you wait for results, which is not so with Him, as an outworking of His unlimited creative power. Omitting Him, is seeking to gain all from nothing at once or by degrees. Staring into space is about as productive as that, in an examination. It is not space but the power to make it and its contents, including the causal system, which is required.
It is God.
Yes, we are of course talking of God, the Spirit who has no limits and is what He wishes to be, being competent without limit in all things, consistent in all things, and never changing in anything, so that His eternal nature overturns a logical fallacy.
NOT NOTHING
AND NOT DITHERING
What fallacy is that ?
It is the fallacy that you can EVER have nothing as the entirety, or NO future would come, for in nothing there is NO future or POTENTIAL or anything else.
So that there HAS to be something eternal always there, since we are here.
Of course, and further, it has to be eternally competent to command, and to do that with concepts and integrating purposes to produce integralities, things that are consistently, persistently functional by using multi-task means to fulfil singular plans such as we embody, while beyond this, magnificently as a creation episode, we can actually make plans for ourselves.
Without limits, He imposes limits. Without being constructed, He constructs. Being eternal, He makes what has a derivative nature. The backstop is the first, and the eternal is the necessary origin. With Him, there is no waiting imposed by serial causation such as we face (except where He acts directly). But what an idea is this nothingness that has to produce something and then the rest in stages, as demission of deity is forced to do. Of course it can IMAGINE matter and so on, but this is not causation, except psychologically! It has to have everything caused from the structure and laws of matter to what asks what is the matter with matter or man or anything else. it is not gentle trying to waft up what is limited, to what is much better, in the teleological spectral idea, which is mere displaced deity acting in ways not attested. He does not waft up; what He has done is here and not making supermen or the like. Life is not like that.
Far from it. The making of intelligence is only part. There is the thrust to make imagination which intelligence can use, and to find wisdom which supervenes, and understanding which supervises.
Even our brains can be used by minds that have any savvy at all and spirits that can imagine things, to make instant conceptual creations. Not all of ours are like that, but SOME ARE. How much more can an unlimited Being of eternity for which our delimited earth modes are like a novel, under control and a product of what is capable for it, be induced without time limit, as some of the ancient theologians insisted*2, and that rightly.
Time is irrelevant ?
Of course. If it were a notional constraint, then whatever yielded to that sort of thing would not be God, but a being of defined, delimited, constrained capacity, and hence a creature, a creation merely.
What is the end of it all, then is an eternal and unlimited Being, irreducible by anthropological nonsense, who has no time for struggling efforts, but institutes what fully meets his will. If there be steps, they are not quality-defective, but a preferred method; and they do not enable what is contrary to Him at all. It may seem good to institute things by method, but not by a limiting method, rather a creatively attractive and appealing method. Six days to do it might seem rather a lot to some*3, but there is the point that you cannot imagine what ALL power prefers, since there is the whole point of what HE IS LIKE and HOW He likes to act. Method and achievement are what this universe reeks of; and mathematical models and means, engineering and entrepreneurial marvels past count and penetration adorn things, so that whether in astronomy or variability about a kind, and the multiple means of using a given piece of equipment, such as allowing the same SIZED brain to perform far more because of this, when it is so constructed, there are almost endless wonders of intermeshed contrivances and laws, covering things with a perfection of modelling skill that astounds the mind and induces worship ...
Worship ? Certainly, you don't worship a spectre stuck in some universe and trying to push things upward, since this is a delimited creation, and you don't find a squad of results of such efforts as they progress. It is all decisive, and current, with results from our misdeployment of powers as obvious as the first creation*4. You worship the God who shows NO tendency to move upward in experimental efforts (since He knows), but only in methodological maestro performances, dependent on nothing, constrained by nothing, immersed in nothing, direct result of His unconstrained self, being the summit and summary, yes more, the Origin and Creator of all.
Come off it. Why should I worship the eternal Creator of myself, the universe, its magnificently contrived and immeasurably co-coded laws in their multiple methods and felicities, the Maker of imagination and liberty in our derivative fomrat, of the power to revolt and to love ? Is He a good chap ? I need to know more before I think of worship. To be is one thing; to be worshipped is quite another.
I like your point. To worship power, mental or physical, financial or conceptual, the author of constraint or majesty, just to do this, it is not good enough.
You amaze me, I thought you made some profession as a Christian.
The FACT THAT I NEITHER DO NOR WOULD WORSHIP ANY SUCH THING IS ONE ASPECT OF THAT VERY FACT.
You mean that being a Christian should be seen as ATTESTING that you would not worship magnificent mentality, illimitable power and inordinate creative capacity, even that which MADE YOU!
It would tempt me a little; but it would not suffice. No, I would not worship just that.
Why would it tempt you ?
WORSHIP IN ENDEMIC BUT WORTHY ?
DEPENDING ON THE
CASE - THIS ONE IS
I expect it is for this reason: that I am looking at an actual God who NOT ONLY has all that you have been envisioning, and which nothing else has or could have (since systems of gods would require the facilitator for their communicative and correlative systematics). To speak of SOME of His unique qualities naturally ...
Or supernaturally ?
Something of both ... leads me towards worship.
But those we have just noted, these by themselves are not enough ?
Not quite. It is rather like smelling a perfume you have never sniffed on any but one, who is your wife. Smelling it, and then seeing some petals from a rose she was wearing, and seeing her glasses is a combination which distinctly reminds you of her, and may set your mind towards affection; but it is not enough for all that.
Naturally. What more then ?
You need to see here or hear her voice, and that in such a responsive situation that you can invent tests to check that it is not just a programmatic substitute for her that someone has used to deceive or trick you.
You are rather ... wary aren't you ?
Yes.
How short can you get ?
Very. It reminds me of an advanced degree oral I once took. The Professor kept on interrupting my answers to his questions, so I decided to cut them short and let him ask for more if he wanted it. After the examination, although he gave me a good honour, he still marked me down, and this statedly involved my SHORT answers. I did not like it, ethically, to contest a result, and so did not protest that I had contrary to desire, MADE them short, to avoid a stream of verbal collisions with him, in the interests of order and clarity in an examination.
But suppose just for me, you expand it a little, now ?
All right. First of all, remember, that this matter of identifying one's wife, it is an illustration. The topic is worship of the ultimate glory of the Creator. One NEEDS to be careful.
One can only agree.
Well, you need what is unconditionally an attestation of what is not only unique to God, but sufficiently vital to be assuredly the very one, and not something down the line somewhere. For my part, I am not even interested in making vital dealings with anyone LESS than God, for there is scope for countermanding. Besides, my spirit LOOKS for its Creator, being unlike a car, ABLE to do this. I WANT Him because I need the orientative power and tutelary scope to make me what I am able to be, for I lack adequate knowledge and wisdom in myself.
So you want evidence of the One who knows all, can do anything, acting in His own name, for His own part.
Correct.
It is logically necessary that He BE, and you find it functionally necessary to FIND Him.
Yes.
Indeed, one could perhaps go further.
True.
NOTHING which has ANY of the aspects of a creation is what you logically want to find, firstly, and secondly desire experientially to discover. It must confirm the uniqueness which only God can have.
That, except that I have already found the first and discovered the second.
You KNOW God ?
I say I am a Christian, not hoping to be one; and what better place to find what one is than checking the record.
You refer, I imagine, for I HAVE spoken to you before, to John 17.
True. THIS is eternal life to KNOW GOD and JESUS CHRIST whom He has sent. That is what it says.
Eternal life being His gift, and this gift being that this eternal life comes, you MUST have it if you are indeed a Christian.
So.
You DO have it, you DO know God. John 17 says this.
Correct. Thus He can correct me and train me, for now we are talking not of the INSTITUTION of something by creation, but the QUALIFICATION, the training and exploiting of the capabilities of something, using intimation, information and conceptualisation.
Where do you find this ? It is in the ONLY written record which possesses the qualities we have been discussing re what is the assurance site and situation, for knowing God.
You mean the Bible.
What else ?
There is nothing even slightly competitive at this level.
Good. God in the Bible says so and I have found it so not only over the past 20 years of writing and research in detail, but far more in what went before in categorical confirmation.
Is that all ?
All ? If you want method, I have it in two chapters*5 but it is more than method. This is dealing with demonstration; but there is also discovery in the first place.
It is then not entirely a written record, and all it portends in the setting of all human history and knowledge ?
Far from it. THAT is sufficient; but it is not exuberant. Creation is exuberant and attests it.
True.
You are getting the brevity idea ?
Mayhap.
There is JESUS CHRIST, a PERSON who in a FORMAT, one of our own type, that of a MAN, did a number of things.
Yes, I know.
I know you know, but we are discussing an application of the point.
Then ...
God specified an identikit so hard to display that only God could do it, concerning miracles, time of coming and going, method of entry into our universe, mode of exit, reason for exit, accomplishments to be achieved when here, a whole realm of emotions which would result in man towards this man who would be the outward format that God took. He thus showed that He IS PERSONAL, as imaginative thought in making persons pre-eminently attests, that He can speak and act in perfect accord AS a person, that He cares for us, that it is ALL our fault...
I don't think I like that last part entirely.
Men don't. There are always two sides, they say ? Rubbish. We do not imagine an idea and then apply it, but in any sort of scientific restraint or constraint for that matter, imagine what MEETS the case and then test it, using the utmost of intimacy of capacity with what we seek and what we envisage as we look and test.
The opposite of evolutionism ?
Necessarily. It looks where it is neither logically nor empirically nor functionally to the point, but instead, in a vainglorious muddle and mess, in the least apposite direction, appealing to what has LESS than intelligence than a moron to evince more than the intelligence (by far) than that of our greatest artists, scientists, philosophers, architects and engineers, not to mention theirs.
It is all our fault ?
Yes. When you come to the entire origin of ALL our powers (not all our misuses, that is optional and a result of the magnificent creation of freedom which is the ante-room to friendship and love), you would not want error, since we would be systematically limited by this, and nothing could be found because of this systematic defect.
You mean that God is morally and functionally perfect ?
Of course He is. You remember, at the functional level, no limits. If his power and his desire did not match, imperfect would be the result, but delimited would be this non-deity, a mere creature. We are not discussing a creature. I would NEVER be even SLIGHTLY tempted to worship a creature. The very thought is abhorrent, immeasurably atrocious, servile and obsequious, demeaning and absurd. That, it is just someone else. WHO is someone else made along with myself ? Just another.
You are right.
Great to hear it.
Is that egotism ?
No, because in this case we are talking of God and when you draw near to Him, you do not want to have something else or less supervene; for nothing is anywhere near so great; nor is anything so necessary as the ultimate assurance which is not an endless lead but the foundation.
Why is God morally perfect ?
A chief function of morality is not to use power for your own purposes, to the detriment of what is the true and due need of another, provided that the ground of estimation of need is the definitive statement of the Creator, who alone knows it ALL and so gives sound perspective.
I see. You mean that HE does not create things and deprive them wilfully or ignorantly or carelessly, far less with twisted pleasure, delinquent concerning their need, since this is to gain satisfaction to meet a correlative purpose, from hurting what He makes, through no fault of itself. To create like that would mean a twisted personality, not sufficient for its desires, constrained and contained with dissident wishes and abilities, creating to make up for internal defects or deficiencies; and these ? where do they come from ? ONLY from being created and made that way. THAT is by definition not God.
So no such thing is in view.
Of course not.
So He gives, not desiring to get for self-fulfilment.
He does not have to fulfil what is already fulfilled being eternal and complete, nor so to act in time, being beyond it and having created it as a mode beneath His own creative and ontological being.
IF He did, it would argue a creature. I see. So morally, He creates the man, creates the method, creates the moral aptitude in man, declares it so that man will not fall while looking in vain, an indirect form of cruelty, and seeks to squeeze nothing out of man, but rather to supply him with all his need.
True.
When therefore Christ came and acted in precisely this way, speaking even of love, going beyond this in His own characterisation, but meeting the moral need perfectly in terms of the Eternal Creator, He was qualifying to the uttermost morally.
Not only so, it was foretold that He would thus act; and God indicated long before, millenia before, that this was His mode, and He has told that it has always been so, evidenced in His coverage of cause and effect in downfall in history, even that of specified empires, of man himself as a race, and in uplift; in principle and in Christ, in person.
It all fits perfectly.
There is moreover nothing else that so attests itself in kind, quality, verifiability and validity.
What do you mean by validity ?
There is much to be found on this*6. However here, my meaning includes this. If you know a few operational things, bully for you. But if you do not have access to THE TRUTH, absolute truth past mere reaction and reactionary realisations, built on yourself and your response at your own level, and have no means of assessing your own level, except that it is limited, then you cannot know what you are talking about ULTIMATELY. You know, mediatively in part. Not immediately in the realm of utter and assured, competent and supervisory vision.
So ?
If you do not know the truth, you assuredly cannot pass it on.
True.
To be found, the truth must be found where alone it CAN BE.
Correct.
Where it CAN BE found, it is only where GOD is understood to be, tested to be found out, meets the just tests of our created reason to show that this is no oddity, but that our reason itself is a component adequate at the outset at least, to find not folly but function and not abstract nonsense but verifiable truth. This not only confirms creation by the God of truth, but allows one to seek Him truly. Verification then confirms all, just as valid, non-self-contradictory approach enables it.
Further, I see, it must be that the tests are adequate. They involve not only intellectual but moral and personal elements, so that the Bible provides enough, but the Christ the lot. Examples before attested it; Christ invested it.
Let's look around now a little more. Take the human brain. That magnificent testimony by its very nature, to the correlation of concepts and command, it is not only to be there, but to be programmed with relationship to the spirit of man (the purpose, the thrust, the desire to innovate helping it not to tone down and out, as one grows old, for example!). It appears able to be stirred, stimulated by effort and a desire to upend from lassitude. It can even set about providing re-organisation, it seems, when so stirred in some cases at least, and that is something amazing in the context of its multiplicity of parts, complexity of concept and inordinate-seeming facility for function, like a grand piano to end grandeur for ever, in created format.
That ? It is mere method. The MIND is far greater, being alive. It plays on it ?
Indeed. This feature, the mind of man, can influence by ITS part the function of the vitality-sensitive brain, without even understanding the method. Whatever the work on muscle, the stress-strain work is obvious. When it comes to vitality, whatever the mode of transfer to brain, it is this, spirit-brain, which is the essential feature.
We go further, then. Not only is this so, but the spirit of man can use the mind to stir the brain, and the brain can respond by virtue of the contingency and vitality-reactive modes geared, programmed into it.
Do you think it is rather more than program that is attested here ?
Overall, necessarily so. It is much more than our ideas of programs, since the brain seems resourced so that it may respond to personal action in an organisation-making manner. The vitality of the stimulus is personal, the result is re-organisation. It is response to vitality, a thing of life and not just an idea put into physical form. In one, we think, we act, the body reacts observably. In the other, we live, actions flow, overall response occurs on a grand scale. In common: stir and get. In diversity: act and get distinct and observable result, case one; or enliven and get overall and complex results, like a horse responding to encouragement rather than a hoof absorbing new nails and swelling slightly - case two.
That clarifies it.
In one case, it is a stress-strain-grow sort of combination, relatively simple, straightforwardly physical. In the other, it is vitality-response. One is purely and recognisably mechanical, whatever the idea. The other is moral and spiritual in itself, whatever the means. Even if you are not vital, but afraid, you have to make vitality have a meaningful substitute, trying to be innovative and more than routine in action. Work and get is one way; be enlivened and find, it is the other. The means of access are not known in the latter case, but the stimulus is from life.
Yes, it is. You can of course try to innovate in order to stir your brain, but even this is a personal type of thing by nature. It is something which gives ground directly for the SPIRIT and MIND of man to extend its horizons ideationally, in their own conspectus, and then provides means at that level, like a re-strung piano.
You might attempt vitality for pride of course, but then you know what you are doing, and so it is not vitality which moves, but deception. Yet the spirit of man is the functionality which uses this, and the interlocking to the brain to give it scope for the ideational and idealistic, this is work of no mean art.
No mean art ? Next you will say Leonardo da Vinci was a schoolboy artist.
I am glad you appreciate the under-statement.
It is true. The realms of interaction and interplay, the mind, the body, the spirit of man, the understanding and the perspective, all this has to be assigned in ascending stations, each style moved upwards, to be planted in its own exalted site, if one is to come anywhere near to being descriptive of man. Vitality, mentality, morality, the aesthetic, poetic, the architectural, the ideationally architectural, constructing modes of thought for analysis, the loving, the inspirational: all this is a series of cosmoi, types of operation that cover entire realms with their own modes and significance and origin. These cosmoi are integrable in the overview of the spirit of man, and the whole being considered, it is sited in other causative realms. Thus there is an integrational unity that is operative, and its cause may be reached in thought by something like diagnostic synthesis*7. The result is profound, and it is man; but the cause IN ITSELF IS FAR MORE.
How ?
What shows what is there is not the same as what IS there.
Ah!
What IS there, being shown is such a triad of wonder, called man, vitality, conceptualisation, mentality, morality, abstract thought, empirical confirmation, aesthetic realisation and spiritual perception being components of this mind-matter-spirit trilogy, that when you look for its Mentor and the mind that made it and the cause of its individual components and their wedding into mutual workability, you are left stunned by wonder, amazed in awe, delighted in morality and ...
Ah yes of course, you worship.
Would you worship Christ ?
Yes.
Why ?
It is because as we have just seen, He is attested as deity and so deserves it.
What of the morality and personal aspects ?
He is the criterion of love, the author of it, God the original in Himself, Christ the perfect expression of Him, who did not send a valet but the Prince. HE PAID for our salvation, so that it is always sufficient, proficient; but He does not waste it. Predestining those whom He foreknow, He covers the cost for each; but His death, it being that of the perfectly moral person dying for the immoral, the perfectly willing for those who had been unwilling to be perfectly moral, or unable because of other sins, is an infinite contribution and so is sufficient for any. Its refusal is sufficient to dismiss it, but its acceptance is sufficient to enable salvation. God ensures that none is lost who might be found, for love is no dictator. We fell and He acted; but now He has arisen, and the cover for curse is gloriously rampant, like a plague in reverse. You see it in Romans 5, 8 and Galatians 3, with Colossians 1:19 following, for example.
You mean that this magnificent morality is the heartland of man's every high aspiration and the source of the code for conformity to the reality of deity given to man, and that it is exemplified to perfection in the person of Jesus Christ, given a supreme task to cover curse, remit wrath and deliver from death: this attested in prophecy, performed beneath the critical eye of rebellious man, so that NOTHING could be shown deficient.
He did all things well, and none could show the contrary; and that, it was so EVEN WHEN the LEVEL (like a 100 foot high jump for an athlete) was so far beyond man's limited capacities, that only God COULD do it.
And so your worship ?
What else ? It is to GOD, the God of fact, of truth, not some invention, that I worship. It is He who is my Creator, inventor, maker of my moral clime, intellectual site, aesthetic discernment, capacity for love, and in Himself, provider of the acme of that love, the source of all knowledge and truth, sublime in intention, unremitting in purity, apt to discipline, capable of rebuke as in the impacts of suffering for fallen and feverish mankind, sufficient for redemption. Indeed, He has done it for those who repenting find in Him all their desire, as man should have done from the first. He had the powers and the wonder, and the love and the mercy. He came in glorious humility.
Yet for all that, the test of His purity was real enough, since these powers, as we note in the temptation of Matthew 4, were not used for His convenience but for man's need, and His identification, so that man MIGHT believe in, come to and find in Him that rest for his restlessness and due centre for his worship ...
... which makes him man and not clever beast or dauntless devil, depending on which man, in his amazing personal equipment, decides to imitate. It is gloriously beautiful to find this, that all our quests and desires, the failure to find which has much to do with the formation of that blasted heath, the cynic, are engendered by our creation and this by our Creator who being more than the best of this, and stooping to cover the worst of it, has shown not only His power to create both man and solutions, but His stature and splendour, moral, spiritual and personal.
The track to truth has then proved to be the path to a peace worth having, since it is not statuesque, but spiritual with a grandeur, not of wonder for great power alone, but for a wisdom which has a profundity matched by love in perfect unison.
Here is the site for worship.
It is not only justice but joy to engage in it, here only.
This track of truth, these meadows of mercy, how beautiful they are ... for in His morality, mercy and munificence, He engaged in personal sacrifice, even the Cross of Christ, to summon ransom to cover sin, and removing wrath, grant peace*8.
It is, yes you are right, the peace of pardon.
NOTES
On Denton, and Hoyle, for indications of their formulations in this area and arena see: News 57, which has additional references which may be followed.
See Let God be God Ch. 12, as marked.
See discussion and evidences in the area following *2 as above.
Augustine and Clement were both dismissive of any requirements whatever for time in creation; the former intimating that NO time was required, though God chose a sequence, while Clement is emphatic as is Augustine, that the world was created not in time but with time. Time is an appendage of choice, not of necessity: an instant is enough; chosen ways are discretionary.
See Ch. 1 of Spiritual Food and Spiritual Drink, This is the Real Missing Link. See also SMR pp. 582-594, 611ff., 620ff.. See also SMR pp. 839ff..
Consult: What is the Chaff to the Wheat ? 3 AND 4 (compendium on method).
See also: SMR pp. 316Bff., 315Aff., 88, 92, Introduction, CHILORI Book (endlessly unreasonable irrationality has many clothes, but none fit), Repent or Perish Chs. 2, 7,
See TMR Ch. 5, Deity and Design ... Section 8 for example.
See Chapter 1 above.
See II Corinthians 5:17-21, Galatians 3, 5, Romans 3:23ff., Ephesians 2.